Suchergebnisse

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states conducted a bombing campaign, referred to as Operation Allied Force, against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) from 24 March to 9 June 1999. The conduct of the bombing campaign has been subjected to a degree of outside scrutiny, particular by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (OTP ICTY). This outside scrutiny process is not unprecedented. In particular, following the Gulf Conflict of 1990–91, Human Rights Watch produced a study entitled 'Needless Deaths in the Gulf War' and Greenpeace produced 'On Impact: Modern Warfare and the Environment, A Case Study of the Gulf War.' In addition, the United States Department of Defence (USDOD), which was not an outside scrutineer, produced a Report to Congress on the Conduct of the Persian Gulf War which included an Appendix O on 'The Role of the Law of War.'

The author commenced an earlier study of the 1980 United Nations Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons (Conventional Weapons Convention) by quoting the late Sir Hersch Lauterpacht's remark: "If international law is, in some ways, the vanishing point of law, the law of war is, perhaps even more conspicuously, at the vanishing point of international law". He then carried Lauterpacht's statement one stage further to suggest that the vanishing point of the law of war was most likely to be found in the body of law restricting the use of weapons. Shortly after writing these words, the author discovered that a colleague had also used the remarks of Sir Hersch and asserted that the vanishing point of the law of war was the law of air warfare. More recently, the author read a paper by a younger colleague in which Sir Hersch was quoted once again, but this time it was asserted that the vanishing point of the law of war was to be found in the body of law regulating nuclear weapons. The two lessons one might derive from this brief tale are that serious students of the law of war rarely have grandiose expectations for their discipline and that a good quotation is always reusable.

Au debut d'une précédente étude consacrée à la Convention sur l'interdiction ou la limitation de l'emploi de certaines armes classiques (Convention sur les armes classiques), adoptée par les Nations Unies le 10 octobre 1980, l'auteur du présent article avait cité le regretté Sir Hersch Lauterpacht: «Si le droit international est, sous certains aspects, le point de fuite du droit, le droit de la guerre est, quant à lui, et de façon peut-être encore plus manifeste, le point de fuite du droit international». Portant la formule de Lauterpacht un pas plus loin, l'auteur suggérait que le point de fuite du droit de la guerre devait très probablement çtre constitué par l'ensemble des régles qui interdisent ou limitent l'emploi des armes. Peu de temps aprés avoir écrit cela, l'auteur a découvert qu'un de ses collègues, utilisant également la formule de Sir Hersch, avait affirmé que le droit de la guerre aérienne représente le point de fuite du droit de la guerre.

The central question dealt with by William E. Conklin inIn Defense of Fundamental Rights is "Why are fundamental rights considered fundamental?" (p. 2). In Part I he looks at traditional juridical answers to this question (all of which he finds unacceptable). In Part II he turns to the answers of philophers, in particular John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, and then goes on to formulate his own view as to what is, in his words, "the ultimate norm in a democratic society" (p.6). Lastly he makes use of this norm to determine which rights are fundamental and when they may be infringed. In the Introduction Conklin discusses what he means by "fundamental". This is the key term in his book and an ambiguous one so that such a discussion is necessary. As Edel has pointed out, when we say rights are fundamental we may mean either that they are axiomatic in the moral system; i.e., that they are the rights from which other rights derive, or that they have greater weight than other rights within the moral system.